


Alleluia, Amen

by lasersforeyes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-18
Updated: 2013-03-18
Packaged: 2017-12-05 18:08:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/726269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasersforeyes/pseuds/lasersforeyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean remembers times that Castiel has touched him.  (AU for end of 5x22, "Swan Song")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alleluia, Amen

**Author's Note:**

> This was the first "Supernatural" fanfic I ever wrote! It pulls from 4x01, “Lazarus Rising,” 4x16, “On the Head of a Pin,” 5x03, “Free to Be You and Me,” and 5x22, “Swan Song.”

i.

It comes to you sometimes: something like a memory, if memory had many eyes and could see what you could not. That surprisingly cold night, September, Illinois. The door of the aged barn, the lights exploding in sparks like blossoms falling, unable to withstand the energy that crackled through the air, the smell of ozone and something that even now, for some reason, makes you imagine the vacuum of space. How your skin tightened across your bones and all your hairs stood on end as he walked through, the dying lights making bizarre shadows of him that still flicker across the blank spaces of your subconscious mind: shapes with curved horns, or sharp claws, things with broad wings or many interlocking wheels.

Deep in the recesses of you, the smallest units memory can retain, you recall the moment of not breathing, head tipped up, muscles contracted, an explosion of fear and something else, buried in your lower belly, because in a split second that passed before you were even cognizant, your body cried out, in recognition. You knew him, something of you knew him, before he even walked in the door.

ii.

The smell of ozone and the sound of a flock of birds, taking flight. Your body is damp with heat, claustrophobia. The blankets are too tight, the room too small. His shadow across the ceiling, here, then gone, then here: cars rushing past, far out on the freeway. The blinds make stripes across his form -- always surprisingly slight -- sitting on the edge of your bed.

“Don’t you dare ask what I was dreaming about.” Your voice sounds clogged and nasal to your own ears; not so long since the hospital, and you still fear choking in your sleep. Still feverish on pain pills and infernal nightmares.

He is silent, his silence epochal, filled with a high hum like those sounds that they say the planets make, frequencies our cells know. You believe it, now. You believe in many terrifying things. A band of light falls across his eyes; you do not yet think back on the first night, in Pontiac. He’s still too new.

“I am sorry,” he says at last. Voice a scrape along the bones of your ear, a vibration down your spine. You flare in anger.

“Is this what you meant when you said you could throw me back into Hell?” Sharp, trying to cut him, because the best defense is a good offense, and somehow you can’t stop throwing yourself at him, a bird battering against a window.

The incline of his head takes centuries. You don’t breathe. Even lost now in shadow, his eyes are like pole stars. Your gut tightens painfully on itself. Breaths come shallow; he sucks all the air from a room. “You are a righteous man.” His breath so close to your lips seems human, but rustles across strange deserts, a ghost-scent of foreign flowers. “You are better than you know.”

You think he’s going to kiss you. The gears of your mind have frozen to a terrified halt, and into the void, that same strange hum, a galaxy, there in the too-small motel room; the shadow of him falls across the graven landscape of your body, a shadow far too big for the slight frame, and where it falls, deserts bloom, rush of blood as though your veins were dessicated rivers until now, this moment.

You’re not sure you can fight him off if he tries; Alistair really took it out of you. Still, your hands are in fists at your sides like you’re ready to fight; reflex. But his lips are startlingly soft, warm, on your forehead (they always looked so-- but you don’t finish the thought).   
“I will never ask that of you again.” A promise you didn’t ask him to make. The skin of your cheeks is tight where tears have mysteriously run. You draw in a fluttering breath, and he’s gone.

When you exhale, it is the word you didn’t realize you’ve been silently repeating.

_Please, please, please, please..._

iii.

A year goes by, you forget, for the most part, the terror your animal mind used to feel when he looked at you.

Always been _Cas_ , kind of a dick, but tolerable as far as angels go.

Still, sometimes, the smell of him.   
Something ancient and alarming as burning frankincense, or alien like the smell of wild electricity.

It’s there, now, but mingled with something else. He smells like sweat, human. Sharp prickles of intimate familiarity: the beer you’ve been giving him, and arousal. You laugh comfortably at him.

“Wondered there, for a minute, if you were gonna even be able to...you know...” Significant arch of the eyebrows. He looks ruffled, a bit lost. It’s funny. “Didn’t know if you guys knew how to use the equipment or what.”

Funny, too, though you don’t let yourself realize it--the first thing you’d thought of when you heard that hooker scream was a panicked impression of great interlocking wheels, of a vast celestial tundra and the beat of many wings. A knot instantly inside of you, holding onto your guts: envy. But now, his slim, unimpressive body slumped in a chair, dark hair sticking up unevenly, rumpled and un-threatening, you almost feel sorry for him.

“Of course I do. I have observed almost every form of human copulation there is over the past two thousand years.” 

His fingers -- his vessel’s fingers -- rest on the ancient amphora full of holy oil. You find yourself watching them, the movements as they trail idly. Fingertips becoming grey with dust, thoughtlessly caressing. Rumble of thunder in his human vocal chords. That secret dark within you shivers again.

“Oh yeah?”

The house is full of your peculiar silence -- the two of you, who wait on either end of eternity, you a ticking clock, he the stillness between the seconds. He raises his face, beatific now, none of the confusion and alarm you saw at the brothel. A nod. Eyes like electrical storms, God, how have you not thought of this until now?

When it happens, though, you’ll suddenly feel that you have _always_ thought of it; you'll feel that something terrible is culminating, some ferocious prophecy that has little to do with God or the Devil. If flocks of ravens could have prophecy, or foxes in the woods. Feral things that smell like rain. You are on your back with a thought from him, yet when his hands fall upon you, they are shockingly gentle, and amazingly sure.

And his body on you, in you, feels so human -- skin soft where it never sees the weather, streaked with sweat and reddening under your nails -- but has a curious weight, as though it holds more inside it than you could possibly imagine. You feel it in the base of your spine, tighten your fingers on the slender hipbones, the lines of ribs, digging at the creature within. It creaks and stirs under the floorboards of your mind, the memory, some blinding flash of light, then nothing. Then his salty, human lips, tang of iron and wet tongue. You pull at the dark mess of his hair, whispering pornographically.

“Fuck me...”

He’s still a bit too immovable. Still hunches and flexes his shoulders awkwardly as though there were something there, a great power and weight. Still bores into your skull with those unearthly eyes. But this is manageable; your heart no longer trying to pound its way out through your brain -- he is hot, warmer than a man, but not scorching. Your knees clutch his hips and you rock your body against his, finally jolting it. He is buried deep in there, but when he comes inside you, you feel it: sparks of lightning and eyes in the wind. You don’t remember screaming but the next morning your throat is raw.

The bed is empty when you wake, but he seems to hang over, around you, like a haze in the air. A perfume of longing, lazy rustle of wings in the winter sun. There is an ache like a chasm in you, and you’re not sure why.

iv.

It happens more than the once. Not so often that you could call it a _thing_ , not so infrequently that you don’t get somehow used to it. Always that little tremor, though, under your heart when you lean in. Nerve endings on the blade of a knife. A fading reminder, like the scar you don’t look at. The knowledge of _him_ , tucked and filed away in the dusty cabinets of your mind, where all the things go that you can’t deal with. And after all, it’s the freaking _Apocalypse_ , and you can’t be worrying about Cas right now.

Can’t let yourself think of how you can feel him, slipping away. You only register an increasing annoyance when you look at him. Eyes too full of _emotions_ , like everyone else. Just some hapless scrawny guy in an ill-fitting suit and beat-up trench coat. Shoulders still hunched like the weight of flightless wings, pressing down.

It wasn’t until you were in the room with Lucifer that you remembered it: the tug of all that power on your body, the fine hairs quivering like radio antennae. Short breaths and blood prickling to the surface like you were about to be sucked into outer space. You felt a crush of anger, then-- your conscious mind enraged at all that you’ve gone through, at the _futility_ , your subconscious screaming for that of which it is bereft. You left the building with your heart turned inside out, nerves on the outside of your skin, and a black hole inside your head.

“I’ve got to talk to him.” The wallpaper in the motel room is peeling, dark stains as though the entire world is slowly rotting. Cas’ eyes are two plates of milk blue glass. An eerie future echo; your anger flares hot and you can’t bear to look at him.

“Dean, there is nothing we can do.”

You turn on him. “You mean there’s nothing _you_ can do, you wingless, junkless pussy!” Your words have finally found edges sharp enough to cut him. You crave his rage, but there is only pain in its place, and you throw him against the wall.

His collarbones beneath your fists, sharp and fragile like birds’ bones. His breaths scatter, and you tear into him. Horns and things with claws. You indent the decaying wall with his slender body, smear your knuckles with his blood. He lets you do it, and only much, much later do you understand _why._

But in the moment, faces close, you can’t stand the smell of him. Musty, fearful, tired. A rime of dirt at the back of his neck. You want to kill him for it. You want to lick it clean. Your belly trembles with a different kind of lust and you toss him onto the bed like a discarded toy. The hole inside you getting bigger.

“Dean.”

Sorrow is powerful like the Pacific Ocean in winter. Ice-black and cold, and you are kneeling at the foot of the bed, crumbling into ruin. His hand on your shoulder in comfort, forgiveness, and the tease of memory only makes it hurt even more. You bend him back, pleading against his chest, tears hot on the weak throb of his mortal heart.

A heavy perfume on the air, not foreign this time: dirty, oily. Detroit. You strip him of everything he has left, you imagine. The clothing, the illusion that this unkempt vessel is not really _him._ His throat clenches in a sound of pain as you sink your teeth in, that soft vulnerable skin just below the edge of his ribs. As though you could tear at his organs, bleed the false body dry. He unfolds it for you, muscles tense and shaking, trusting you. You want to hurt him as much as possible.

For leaving you.

You feel no crackle of power, no gust of giant feathers. Only the hot, fast pulse of his body around you as you’re about to come. You pull out instead, let it spurt across his concave belly, his stretched throat. Swollen lips dazzled with the sheen of it, eyes shut, tongue trembling, licking at pearl drops, the brightest thing in the room. The impression stays with you only for a moment: your come painting his face. Lips moving, perhaps in prayer. You cannot bring him back.

And so you slip away from him, wash his scent from you in the leaky, cold shower. Shadows close around him, asleep or dazed on the bed. Like the black outline of wings.

You know, suddenly and irrevocably, what will come to pass tomorrow. And when it does, when he is gone, the pit inside of you aches with a pain like relief.

v.

It is years later.

You wake and the bed is on fire. The room, the world, this dark corner of Indiana where you thought you could hide from it, the memory. From him. The roof is torn away as you lie gasping, and that coruscating light pours in.

You dreamed of it.

The snow of December evaporates against your body, you reach your arms toward the memory of Hell. _Yes. Oh. Please._

A wind comes to your crooked tower from across all the celestial planes, a hurricane of light, a star falling through the aeons of darkness. You are crouched in blood, in the bile of your own hatred, slick stinking pool of your own regret. Your arms are knives, fingers are hooks. You have dug them into your own corrupting flesh, trying to get at the tiny soul inside. But then the Wind of Heaven calls your name in triumph and the walls of your tower shatter and fall. His six wings are nebulae and stars are the eyes that shine out like a million beacon fires from their depths. His sword is blinding, a meteor, and his face vaporizes your tears as they fall.  
 _Castiel._

“Dean Winchester, come with me.” Thunder of the universe. Song of planets.

You reach your arms toward him, and at his touch your body is immolated with ecstasy, a fire lit in the core of you that consumes all that is filthy and dark, blazing across all the boiling storms of Hell. Across time. Into the past where your body remembers the wet of earth and the spark of thought, into the future where you wake burning, and call his name.


End file.
